101st Anniversary of the RMS LUSITANIA sinking.

Monday, May 7th marks the 101st anniversary of the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania.

RMS Lusitania

The Liverpool-built passenger ship whose destruction sparked the United States’ decision to enter World War I in 1917.

Newspaper notices to avoid sailing on the RMS Lusitania.

“Enlist” (mother and child drowning), by Fred Spear, June 1915. WWI recruitment poster published by the Boston Committee of Public Safety just a month after the Lusitania sinking. (authentichistory.com)

Newspaper coverage.

Just after two o’clock in the afternoon on May 7th, 1915, the luxury liner, heading from New York to Liverpool, was torpedoed by German U-boat 20, and then suffered a second, still unexplained explosion.

The ship sunk in a mere 18 minutes, just 11.5 miles off the coast of County Cork, Ireland. Nearly 1,200 men, women, and children died, including 128 Americans.

RMS Lusitania

The American lives lost were crucial in the U.S.’s decision to enter the war, and indeed, many recruitment posters in the United States offered chilling reminders of the disaster.

Great Video History of the RMS LUSITANIA…

Last year, for the centenary, a huge commemoration ceremony took place in honor of the ship and its victims in Kinsale, Co. Cork.

Over 150 of the victims of the wreck were buried in the town’s Old Church Cemetery.

The events lasted all day and were attended by nearly 10,000 people, including Irish president Michael D. Higgins, British ambassador Dominick Chilcott, American ambassador Kevin O’Malley, German ambassador Matthias Hopfner, and Irish Defense Minister Simon Coveney.

RMS Lusitania

A 2:10 p.m. whistle blast marked the moment at which the Lusitania was struck by the fatal torpedo one hundred years ago.

Other events of the day included a minute of silence and a ceremonial wreath laying by the Irish president and the aforementioned ambassadors at the Lusitania Monument in Kinsale’s town square.

The Lusitania was torpedoed just a few miles from the shore of County Cork, Ireland, where it looms large in the local culture. This memorial in County Cork commemorates the sinking.Photo: Richard Cummins—Corbis / Fortune

It was a sneak attack on a passenger ship that would, in time, help push the United States into World War I.

“The Cunard liner Lusitania, which sailed out of New York last Saturday with more than 2,000 persons aboard, lies at the bottom of the ocean off the Irish coast,” the list of dispatches on The Chronicle’s front page reads. “She was sunk by a German submarine, which sent two torpedoes into her side.”

AMERICANS KILLED

One hundred and twenty-eight of the 139 Americans on board the Lusitania were killed, including writer Elbert Hubbard and businessman Alfred Vanderbilt, despite the hopes of the latter’s wife reported in a story on the page.

The U.S. government began debating a declaration of war against Germany, but President Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t force the issue despite public opinion beginning to shift.

The memory of the Lusitania attack simmered in the U.S. while war raged in Europe. Two years later, after the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sent the Zimmermann Telegram, a message to Mexico seeking a partner to invade the U.S., the war would be the only answer.

Three and a half years after its sinking, the Lusitania would be avenged with an Allied victory.

One of the fascinating stories surrounding the ship regards a notification printed by the German Embassy in various American papers on April 22nd, 1915, little more than a week before departure.

While the ad did not explicitly mention the Lusitania, it noted ominously that any passengers attempting to make an Atlantic crossing and entering Great Britain’s waters would be doing so “at their own risk.”

Many chalked it up to wartime intimidation, and some, including the ship’s captain, William Turner, dismissed the notice as a colossal joke. Turner managed to survive the disaster, and it is likely realized the folly of his believing the threat to be “Berlin’s latest bluff,” as London’s Daily Telegraph had termed it.

Some historians believe that the second explosion, which caused the Lusitania’s rapid descent, was catalyzed not by a faulty boiler as some lab test has suggested, but by munitions being secretly ferried from the then-neutral United States to England. In this camp falls Gregg Bemis, an American venture capitalist who owns the salvage rights to the ship.

In the early 1980s, however, the new maritime law extended national jurisdiction to 12 nautical miles off-coast, making the Lusitania just within Ireland’s domain.

Bemis preparing to descend to the wreck in June 2004. Courtesy of Gregg Bemis / Fortune

A 1994 documentary vaulted the ship back onto the radar of the diving world, and that same year, a crew of divers, without Bemis’s permission, plundered the ship. Both Bemis and Ireland sued, and the divers eventually returned the purloined items to Bemis, their lawful owner, who donated them to Irish museums.

First Class Dining Room

Despite the rather tidy end to this debacle, the Irish government began to worry that the Lusitania would fall victim to further looting and quickly placed a protective order on the ship, which would make it necessary to obtain Ireland’s permission – in addition to Bemis’s – to dive there.

First Class Passengers

Bemis hopes to prove that the Lusitania was indeed carrying illicit arms and solve a great historical mystery, but in order to do so, he must make physical changes to the ship that the Irish government views as a historical artifact. The conflict between unearthing the ship’s true legacy and preserving the ship’s hull has led to a legal battle lasting over 20 years from which neither Bemis nor Dublin seems inclined to back down.

While we may have to wait for the true cause of the Lusitania’s sinking, the various myths that surround the ship are just as fascinating as those that follow the Titanic. (The sinking of the two ships, just three years apart, are considered the greatest maritime tragedies of the modern age, and despite the greater immediate impact of the Lusitania’s demise, the Titanic’s legacy has earned greater fame.)

Officers, staff, and crew aboard the ship.

The Lusitania was torpedoed just a few miles from the shore of County Cork, Ireland, where it looms large in the local culture. This memorial in County Cork commemorates the sinking. (Richard Cummins—Corbis / Fortune)

Among the casualties on the Lusitania was art collector Hugh Lane, who was rumored to have been transporting original paintings by Rembrandt and Monet sealed in tubes, which have yet to be recovered (if the rumors are indeed true).

The tantalizing prospect of almost $100 million worth of art hiding there on the ocean floor, not to mention the mystery of the second explosion, makes the Lusitania as intriguing as its ill-fated “sister,” the Titanic.

(Although to this reporter’s knowledge no one has ever made a dramatic short about missing the Lusitania‘s final voyage due to alcoholism.)